Hilaire Belloc

In his thirties, Belloc sought a seat in Parliament, allying himself to radical Liberalism. However, his first attempt at securing a nomination, at Dover in 1903, apparently foundered when the Catholic parish priest rushed to embrace him at the adoption meeting.

He had more luck in 1904 in Salford South by facing the issue of his Catholicism head on. At his adoption meeting, he declared: “My religion is of course of greater moment to me by far than my politics.” Such forthrightness may have assisted his candidacy, as he was selected unanimously. His relief was obvious, as he wrote to his mother a few days later that he was “getting tired of being refused in so many places on account of my religion.”

When the disunited Tory government finally resigned in December 1905, and the incoming Liberal Government immediately went to the country, Belloc again faced anti-Catholic feeling. At his first campaign meeting, Belloc boldly responded to his electoral opponents’ slogan, ‘Don’t vote for a Frenchman and a Catholic’:

Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that he has spared me the indignity of being your representative.

Nevertheless, he benefited from the Liberal landslide in the January 1906 election, gaining Salford South from the Tories by 852 votes.

To his party leadership’s chagrin, he devoted his maiden speech on 22 February, to the plight of imported Chinese labour in South Africa. Though a popular cause for Liberals in Opposition, this was not a government priority, and gave the Tories the opportunity to embarrass them by moving a critical amendment.

That his speech – in what the Times called “some deplorably mischievous and ranting language” – would irritate ministers did not deter Belloc. He wrote that, though he was “sick” after making his “intensely Radical “maiden speech, he was carrying on in the same vein – or, as he put it more lyrically, “I … continue to dance in the sunlight and sing like the gaslight” – by asking a critical supplementary question on the issue on 27 February, “which gave them the greatest possible annoyance.”

Belloc was often at odds with the Liberal mainstream over education reform (where he stoutly defended the Catholic interest); temperance, and through his debate on 19 February 1908 attacking secret political funding as “a peril to [the House’s] privileges and character.”

Even in his first year as an MP, Belloc was disillusioned with the party system and parliamentary politics. In November he wrote that “I cannot stand the House”, and a couple of months later, he was even more damning: “I can see little object in the House of Commons except to advertise work. It does not govern; it does not even discuss. It is completely futile.” He gave vent to these frustrations in political satires such as Mr Clutterbuck’s election (1908) and A change in the Cabinet (1909).

Despite his misgivings – and those of some in his local party – he stood again at the January 1910 general election, scraping in by 316 votes. He contributed little in the Chamber to the major constitutional issue of 1910, the future of the Upper House, seeing the parliamentary battles as covering up a collusion of the political classes to frustrate more radical political reform.

By the time the Liberals went to the country at the end of that year to resolve the constitutional stalemate, Belloc had decided to leave Westminster. In a bitter final speech in November, he claimed that the election was being forced on the country by the parties, and that “I shall not be at pains to play the party game…” Unless he could operate as a truly independent representative of his constituents, he would pursue other avenues: “even the most modest pen in the humblest newspaper is as good as a vote in what has ceased to be a free deliberative assembly.”

After his departure from the Commons he continued to write about his political views, in The party system (1911) and The servile state (1912), but he never sought a return to Westminster. As his Times obituary in 1953 noted, Belloc was “never at home in the House of Commons.” He is still quoted in both Houses, though much more for his poems and aphorisms than for his political views.